Karen Jeppe

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Memorial to Karen Jeppe in her place of birth Gylling
Inscription: Karen Jeppe, mother of the Armenians

Karen Jeppe (born July 1, 1876 in Gylling , Denmark , † July 7, 1935 in Aleppo , Syria ) was a Protestant missionary . She became known for her outstanding humanitarian commitment to the Armenians on the territory of the former Ottoman Empire from 1903 to 1935.

Life

In 1902, at the age of 26, Karen Jeppe joined an aid association for the Ottoman Armenians founded by Åge Meyer Benedictsen . In 1903 she left for Urfa , where she worked in the social institutions founded by Johannes Lepsius after the Armenian pogroms there in 1895.

During the persecution of the Anatolian Armenians, which began in 1915, Jeppe managed to protect the charitable institutions she ran from access by Turkish units. Franz Werfel mentions them by name in this context in his novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh .

After she had to return to Denmark in 1917 due to a spot of typhus , she traveled again to the Orient in 1921, this time to Aleppo in Syria , which came under the mandate of the French League of Nations after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire . As the official representative of the League of Nations , she was in charge of facilities for Armenian refugees within the framework of the activities led by the then High Commissioner for Refugees , the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen . In 1927 Nansen resigned from his post as High Commissioner for reasons of age, and most of the activities in the Orient were then suspended. Jeppe nevertheless continued the activities on his own and also founded an agricultural settlement on the Euphrates, Tel Salmen Missak , which she named after an Armenian adopted child, Misak Melkonian (died 1978).

Karen Jeppe died in Aleppo in 1935 as a result of a malaria infection and was buried there according to the Armenian-Gregorian rite .

plant

In Urfa she developed a new method to teach children to read and write. This attracted attention because the children she cared learned to read and write much faster than children in other schools.

literature

Web links

Commons : Karen Jeppe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Jeppe, Karen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish evangelical missionary and savior of Armenians in Urfa and Aleppo
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Gylling , Denmark
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1935
Place of death Aleppo , Syria